MS Excel - pasting 2/1 or 3/1 then making text to column turns those into dates. How not to?

Question

Say I past the following line into Excel:

2/1 connected 300 normal

Then I click on Data, Text to Columns, Finished

Everything gets put into a column just as I want. But 2/1 gets converted to a date "1-Fed". If I then try to reformat that column to general - that turns it into "39114". Not at all what I want. How do I get that text to remain literally 2/1 and not get converted to a date along the way?

"1-Feb" - that is.

Answer 1

"Then I click on Data, Text to Columns, Finished"

Don't just go right to finished. Click 'Next' until you see: 'Column data format' and then choose 'Text'

Answer 2

In Excel 2003: Select the cell Right click Format Cells Alignment Wrap Text Use Alt-Enter for line breaks within a Cell.

Answer 3

Put a quotation mark in front of the number you want to not convert - "3/1 will treat it like a STRING (text field) instead of a date field